Pizza is an extremely popular food since it is tasty, convenient, and relatively easy to prepare. The success of pizza restaurants has resulted in the proliferation of a variety of pizza franchises specializing in the rapid preparation, baking and serving or even delivering of low cost, high quality pizza pies.
As in any restaurant relying on selling a high volume of products, consistency is a key to achieving success. Significant in building a successful restaurant franchise is the concept of providing food products which meet an expectation of the public with regard to quality of ingredients, product packaging, price, and consistency of taste. Consumers have come to expect that when they order a specific food product from a franchise restaurant, that it will be essetially the same product in a Massachusetts retaurant or another franchise location in Arizona under the same name. In the pizza business, the same is true. Customers expect to receive the same product in various franchise locations, making the preparation, baking and presentation of the product extremely important for customer satisfaction arid therefore, success.
One of the factors which must be controlled to assure a quality pizza crust is in the perforation of the flattened uncooked dough, a process called "docking." Docking is defined in Wayne Gisslen's book Professional Baking, Second Ed., published in 1985 by John Wiley & Sons, as "piercing or perforating pastry dough before baking in order to allow steam to escape and to avoid blistering." Further, in The New Professional Chef.TM., Fifth Ed., 1991, published by Van Nostrand Reinhold, edited by Linda Glick Conway, at page 721, docking is described as "slashing the top of shaped dough before baking it to allow the top to expand an/or to create a decorative effect." In the same book, docking is described at page 845 as "to cut the top of dough before baking to allow it to expand."
Docking is necessary to ensure that undue blistering is all but eliminated in order to enhance flavor--eliminating burnt crust, and to allow ingredients placed on top of the pizza to cook evenly and without being displaced by bubbles, etc. Docking is generally accomplished by hand by either slashing the dough with a knife or by hand rolling an item like a short rolling pin over the dough which has been provided with a series of protrusions with which to pierce the dough. These devices must be of restaurant grade, and must be used properly to have the desired effect.